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Coffee for One Hundred

A method for brewing coffee for a large group using boiled water and a coffee‑egg mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Coffee and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,239 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Coffee for One Hundred

for 100

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grind the coffee.

  2. Mix the coffee with the eggs.

  3. Make small muslin sacks.

  4. Place 1 pint of the coffee mixture in each sack, leaving room for it to swell.

Brew

  1. Add 5 gallons of boiling water to a large coffee urn or boiler with a faucet at the bottom.

  2. Put part of the sacks into the urn.

  3. Boil for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Raise the lid 5 to 10 minutes before serving.

  2. Add 1 or 2 more sacks.

  3. Continue adding fresh sacks at regular intervals.

  4. Remove the first sacks.

  5. Refill with boiling water as needed.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Coffee + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,239 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Roasted coffee
Provides the grounds whose flavor is extracted into the boiling water.
Eggs
Their proteins bind fine grounds and help them settle, leaving the brew clearer.

The step that matters

Raise the lid 5 to 10 minutes before serving.. Lifting the lid lets the brew sit briefly so the grounds settle. Settling clears the coffee and keeps loose grounds from making it cloudy or bitter at the top.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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